Your Daily Dance Break: A Ballet Bullfight

Christopher Stowell will be choreographing an all new world-premiere ballet set to the music of Bizet’s Carmen. Will it be set in Spain? He won’t say. Will Carmen be a cigarette factory girl? He won’t say. He will say that he and Nicolo Fonte (choreographing the world premiere Petrouchka that will share the same program with Carmen) will be creating ballets that are nothing like any Carmen or Petrouchka you’ve ever seen.

That sounded like a challenge to us. So all this week we’ll be giving you the opportunity to sample some other ballet versions ofCarmen so that you will be able to truly assess whether Christopher’s vision is “unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”

For starters, we’ll show you the bullfight scene from russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya’s Carmen.

SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t want to know what happens to Carmen at the end, don’t watch the last two minutes…